


all-purpose flour

by wanderNavi



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Bread, Gen, shoving wips out the door like i’m speed digging my own grave
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:42:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25061803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderNavi/pseuds/wanderNavi
Summary: Ever since Peeta moved out of the bakery, he had to confront the unfamiliar rarity of no longer having a pantry stocked in bulk. At least the essentials were there: yeast, flour, and salt.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	all-purpose flour

**Author's Note:**

> Listen, why should I buy bread from the store when I can make it myself. Also, this lets me get rid of all the freaking cinnamon my parents bought in bulk from Costco. Good god, it’s so much cinnamon.

Ever since Peeta moved out of the bakery, he had to confront the unfamiliar rarity of no longer having a pantry stocked in bulk. At least the essentials were there: yeast, flour, and salt. The first loaf he makes is too large for one person on their lonesome to finish within a timely matter, so he rips off an uneven chunk for himself, tosses it under his cleanest dishcloth, and heads out of the too large house with the rest of bread wrapped in a scrap piece of parchment paper.

Katniss’s sister answers the door when Peeta knocks and he hands the package to her, saying, “I made too much.”

She peels back a corner, neatly, to confirm with her eyes what they both can smell. The loaf’s not warm anymore and Peeta suspects the oven in his kitchen has broken down slightly from years of neglect, so the heat wasn’t as high as it should have been, but he grew up in a bakery and life in District 12 inevitably forces everyone to be adaptable.

“Thank you Peeta,” Primrose politely says. “Would you like some milk in return?”

With milk and excessive haggling with the traders coming in on the trains from out of the district, maybe Peeta can bully his pantry into having enough supplies and ingredients to make some pastries. The people responsible for furnishing his too empty house dumped a slightly manic selection of odds and ends in his pantry – what is Peeta going to do that weird, vaguely humanoid shaped root stuffed into a glass jar in one of his cabinets – and he might as well do something with the alarmingly large collection of food coloring he’s now in possession of. Not even the bakery has that many bottles. Peeta has a solid enough grasp of color theory to mix together just about anything from a humble rainbow of six and a half pastes for everything he decorated. He doesn’t need food coloring called “Razzle Dazzle Rose” that’s really phthalo purple erring on the side of magenta.

“I would,” Peeta says, calculating how much bribery he’ll have to do to get his hands on some almond flour.

Maybe he should give the food coloring hoard to his parents when he visits next never.

* * *

Peeta never manages to get his hands on almond flour and instead the milk is churned into butter and incorporated into soft sticky dough. Even with the stand mixer that abruptly appeared in the house overnight during his first week back in District 12, trying to not crawl out of his skin from nightmares and paranoia every time it rains – which is way too often with fall swooping in with a vengeance – kneading the dough is a long process. He punches and stretches his way through the gluten development. What comes out of the oven is soft and rips easily, cheerfully yellowed and decked with chunks of salt. He doesn’t have a piping bag, so scrapes the cream he’d obsessively thickened into a mason jar and drops them both off at Katniss’s house. Primrose answers the door again.

* * *

When he’s not painting, he’s running in literal circles around the village and making a nuisance of himself at Haymitch. His brothers visit every now and then. Once, Peeta swings by the bakery to help decorate a cake for Madge Undersee’s birthday. It’s the first time he sees his parents since the train from the Capitol spat him back out into District 12’s dusty smothering embrace.

He leaves behind the army regiment of food coloring and takes a stick of cinnamon with him. In the silence of the night, sometimes he can hear Primrose’s goat. Sometimes he can hear what might be Katniss moving around the house that’s nominally her property now. Given that he’s never seen her, he has no way of really knowing. He gives them a tray of cinnamon rolls regardless.

* * *

Then everything goes to hell and Peeta gets his mind stolen from him and somewhere along the line someone says something about funeral services and he finds himself trying to figure out how to write four much belated obituaries.

The force of the bombings knocked everything in the house that wasn’t nailed down onto the floor, so basically all of Peeta’s sparse belongings he was able to accumulate in around a year are scattered everywhere. It’s mostly canvases, including one oil painting that hadn’t finished drying when he was forced to leave District 12 towards his death the second time, but has definitely finished drying by now and is staying defiantly stuck painting side down to the ugly gray floorboards. Peeta tries prying and peeling it off for what feels like fifteen hours, then gives up and wanders off. He doesn’t remotely remember what the painting even was of and at this rate, he’ll be forced to cut it off the fake wood with a knife like a biopsy for skin cancer, so he’ll never get to know.

Peeta’s not the only one who came back to District 12. The train from the shambles of the Capitol and the rebellion’s government picked up stragglers every stop or so, forcing the land called District 12 to host a couple of people from District 3 and 8 trotting around helping out with the cleanup and rebuilding.

So far, cleanup mostly entailed tearing down the fence around the district and dumping all the metal into a towering, twisting heap among the rubble that used to be the border between the Seam and the merchant district as best as Peeta can tell. More than one person vindictively kicks the support poles to the ground and Peeta watches one girl only a few years younger than him leap screaming at a segment, sending it crashing onto the ground with her still howling.

He joins the crews that are picking around the rubble, trying to shift things clear for buildings to be rebuilt. But clearing rubble mostly entails heaving blocks of concrete and wood out of the way to find another charred piece of body or smashed remains of a memento carefully preserved for generations and then sitting among the ash with his head in his hands.

* * *

Peeta regrets the sourdough starter near instantly, especially when the power starts going out unpredictably and supplies are even less reliable. At least the water still runs clearly.

After the sixteenth time Peeta exhaustedly kicked a rock over and hustles up a cloud of noxious ash that he’s learning is the smell of stale burnt flesh, he holes himself back up in the still empty house dumped on him in the Victors’ Village for a full day. Around when the sun starts sprinting towards the horizon, he pilfers a box from the hub set up where people gathered to stare into fires and trade supplies and news. He comes back twenty minutes later with ten loaves of bread.

“Here,” he says. “I made too much.”

Everyday afterwards, he comes back with another loaf or two, created from the starter as he bullies the kitchen into staying in a relatively consistent range of temperature and humidity. Feeling particularly – vindictive? satisfied? settled? – something one day, when he’s managed to coerce the universe into gifting him the ingredients he needs, especially sugar, he makes a batch of pretzels. Most of them go to the steadily increasing population of what’s still called District 12 for now, until the people back at the Capitol finish deciding on what’s the best names to use in reconstructing the nation. The rest he splits evenly between Haymitch and Katniss.

**Author's Note:**

> me: i need to post something already before i go even more fucking crazy  
> This was mostly a stream of consciousness honestly.


End file.
